This week, a dear friend let me in on some thinking he was doing. He was coming to the conclusion that trying to “let go” or “turn off” anger was a bad idea, actually. He linked me this blog post by the late Aaron Swartz, who wrote
Turning off an emotion is always a tough decision. I remember how a couple years ago I decided to say goodbye to anger. Sure, anger has its bright moments — you haven’t really lived until you’ve known that special joy of hurling a chair across the room — but it’s also quite time-consuming. Every time someone comes up and hits you, you have to run around chasing after them. And once you start getting angry it’s hard to stop — an angry person doesn’t really want to calm down, it sort of enjoys being angry. So I finally decided to get rid of the whole thing. And you know what? I haven’t regretted the decision one bit.
My friend had taken this advice very seriously. I didn’t get it from this blog post, but I did too. I tried to say goodbye to certain feelings that I didn’t like having. And both of us now are realizing that this was not a great thing to do, and we are trying to reconnect with emotions like anger that we tried not to feel.
anger is a thing people experience
As a boy and then a guy, you have anger. It’s a thing. It’s an intense emotion. You try to tell yourself: stop being angry, anger is scary and dangerous. But here’s the thing—you can’t just decide not to have an emotion. This is simply not within your ability to do. If you employ some mental gymnastics to try not to feel angry, you will cause all kinds of problems that I myself have experienced and written about some. You will lose touch with your feelings parts of your self; instead of understanding intense emotions you will turn them into uncontrollable monsters; you will lose the very valid information intense emotions are giving you; and you will judge yourself for having very normal emotions.
And that’s the really weird thing. Anger isn’t that scary, but to make it not-scary you need to get used to it. You need to welcome it into the room rather than pushing it away. You need to get to know it, understand why it’s there. And if you do these things, when it shows up you don’t have to then layer a ton of anxiety on top of it. You can feel calm in the situation.
It’s kind of funny and kind of weird that we experience emotions all the time. We’ve all experienced something like anger a thousand times. But personally, because I was pushing it away or telling myself it wasn’t there, I never understood it. I thought it was just bad and I wanted it to go away. Lately, I haven’t been doing that. It’s better to get to know the feeling, then when it shows up you won’t both be angry and anxious.
Beyond all of this, it’s not clear that it is good or ethical or wise to say goodbye to a feeling like anger. I think there is a particular type of thinking in vogue among educated, tech-savvy Americans right now where certain emotions are gauche or “not things good people feel”. Anger is one of these. You can see this in Aaron Swartz’s quote above, where its like anger is something in us that is insufficiently evolved that we can just, through an act of will, let go of. But like, we can’t actually do that.
there is wisdom in anger
I think it’s worth pausing for a moment and wondering why people feel angry. People feel angry when they think they have been wronged. Or that something is out of their control. Or that something doesn’t go their way and they get bad news.
In fact, these situations are bad. And it’s worth wondering: why shouldn’t we have a strong emotional response to them?
So much of the dislike of anger comes from situations where anger is unreasonable: road rage, assault, shouting at a waiter. But this doesn’t mean anger itself is bad. This means that some people feel angry in situations that don’t warrant it: in other words, stuff is going on inside their heads which gives them a lack of perspective and judgement. They perceive an insult or malice where there is none. So let’s criticize their perception rather than an emotional response which, if their perception were better, would be healthy.
I hate to sound like a conservative crank, but it’s worth taking a moment to step all the way back and be like: whatever is going on with humans has been extraordinarily successful. We think in ways that are more or less unique in the animal kingdom, we have highly elaborated culture which is again unique, we are the most dominant species on Planet Earth. We’ve developed highly advanced and mostly peaceful societies. We’re exploring space and making sentient machines. And in the common highly-educated Twitterverse telling of the story, we’re doing all of this in spite of unevolved parts of our brain where we’re lugging around anger.
What if, in fact, something like anger is essential to the whole human project? A sense of self, and a sense of when that self has been unfairly violated, and a strong emotional response to seek boundaries and safety and justice. That seems pretty good to me.
We’re all talking about AI and LLMs right now, so I’ll just say if you had to ask me why the machines won’t take over, like, it’s because they don’t have emotions like anger.
who’s wagging who
To synthesize a lot of experiences I’ve had over time in highly educated Twitter-adjacent spaces, I’ll say that I think there’s an implicit (or explicit) belief in some circles that we can just like make the world exactly like a picture in our heads. So like people are blank slates that we give the good logical ideas to, and that turns off the anger in their brain and then they become more evolved or however you want to call it.
But like, that both isn’t the way things work and it’s not clear if it’s desirable or wise to view the world that way. Beyond this, I think there is a thought that may be scary to a lot of my readers: what if there is actually deep wisdom in our basic emotions, and we can’t logic our way out of that wisdom? In this model, we view our “lizard brain” as a thing to understand and learn from, rather than as an adversary to move past/ignore/deny/etc.
But this challenges the common belief we want to have that our logical mind is in control. This sets up our logical mind as seeking to understand and work with something at least as powerful: our lizard brains.
I personally find this view way healthier, but it was a scary transition. I try to work with my feelings rather than against them. When I think my feelings don’t match reality, I work on understanding why I feel the way I do and I try to understand if/how I’m misperceiving a situation.
There’s a fun little Buddhist anecdote: a monk is asked what he does when he feels angry, and he says “I say hello to the anger and welcome it in.”
Not only do Buddhist monks feel anger, they get to know their anger. And so should we.